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in full agreement with these sentiments. Weizsacker's statement of
these truisms aroused no controversy.
During the week of the commemoration of
Pogromnacht,
Chan–
cellor Kohl, who had insisted on President Reagan going to Bitburg,
spoke to the Jewish community of Frankfurt assembled in the main
synagogue in the Frankfurt West End . The Chancellor said many
true things:
The cynical and
(verharmlosende)
apologetic term
"Kristallnachf'
cloaks what really happened then . On November 9, 1938, Na–
tional Socialist terror against Jewish citizens reached a new
dimension. Ten thousand were imprisoned and shipped to con–
centration camps. Thousands were mishandled . Hundreds were
murdered or driven to death .
The pogrom night was ... a purposeful, systematic, and merci–
less persecution of the Jews. It was the latest point at which
everyone must have become aware that anti-Semitism was the
core of National Socialist ideology, and that it was not a mere in–
strument of domination among others-and certainly not an ac–
cidental, peripheral manifestation of dictatorship.2
Many, he continued, suffered under the Nazi regime. "But the hate
against the Jews-men, women, and children-went further: the
fact that someone was of Jewish origin constituted a crime to be
punished by death." Auschwitz and Treblinka were "rooted from the
beginning in godless ideology which raised a race to the level of a
god." Why, he asked, did so few protest and speak out against the
persecution of the Jews, which began on January 30, 1933, con–
tinued "with growing brutality and in full view of the public," and
penetrated the closest neighbors?
The law, as evident in the Nuremberg racial laws, the Chancel–
lor continued, served to oppress, not protect the weak. The Novem–
ber pogrom was not a spontaneous public outburst but an attack or–
ganized by the government.
It
remained a "source of deep shame"
that the majority of the population remained silent due to lack of
civil courage, fear, or indifference . Others were fIlled with
Schaden–
freude
or participated and profited from the attacks. He recalled "with
2. "Die Anspraehe des Bundeskanzlers anliisslieh des 50. Jahrestages der Progrom–
naeht: Die Mensehen von heute sind nieht besser oder mutiger a1s damals,"
Frank–
jurter Allgerruine Zeitung
Nr. 263 (November 10, 1988), p. 5.
